So I got something.

There are two major openembedded repos: Openembedded-core and meta-openembedded

1. openembedded-core is its own distro (non-distro, or distro-less) so it is similar to what poky is, which is a distro as well and they both have the init script.
2. meta-openembedded is just layers to be added on top of a distro, that is what I was expecting from openembedded but got it wrong.

So when you go to meta-xilinx-bsp for instance, an look at its dependencies, it states openembedded-core. So I went and tried to include that (silly me), but since I'm building on poky I really should have included meta-openembedded instead. And that works because the latter are just meta-layers and won't conflict with poky.

So thats the fix, ignore the dependency of the layer and rename openembedded-core in the link to meta-openembedded.

Hope this saves someone time.